A Desert Harvest

Book excerpt: A career-spanning collection of Bruce Berger’s beautiful, subtle, and spiky essays on the American desert Occupying a space between traditional nature writing, memoir, journalism, and prose poetry, Bruce Berger’s essays are beautiful, subtle, and haunting meditations on the landscape and culture of the American Southwest. Combining new, unpublished essays with selections from his acclaimed trilogy of “desert books”—The Telling Distance, There Was a River, and Almost an Island—A Desert Harvest is a career-spanning selection of the best work by this unique and undervalued voice. Wasteland architecture, mountaintop astronomy, Bach in the wilderness, the mind of the wood rat, the canals of Phoenix, and the numerous eccentric personalities who call the desert their home all come to life in these fascinating portraits of America’s seemingly desolate terrains.